JC Gibbons Manufacturing

Success with The Center

Client Success

JC Gibbons Manufacturing Inc.

# Employees: 25

City:Livonia

Services:LEAN Business Solutions;Quality Systems

JC GIBBONS: Improving Worker Skills and Operations With Training

The Center’s assistance helped our company make a number of improvements in both our workforce and operations. Without training, we wouldn’t have been able to get our internal auditors in place to help keep our QMS on track, and some of our workers would still be lacking the skills needed to understand blueprints. Additionally, we’re excited about the potential cost savings we could have due to the changes made with value stream mapping.-- Dan Gibbons
Vice President

In 1959, John Clifton Gibbons used his entire life savings to purchase some screw machining equipment. From that bold investment, JC Gibbons Manufacturing, Inc. (www.jcgibbons.com) was born. Nearly 60 years later, this machining company is still owned by the Gibbons family. JC Gibbons Manufacturing provides high quality precision CNC machining services and screw machining products to customers. With both 4-axis and 5-axis CNC machines, JC Gibbons Manufacturing can produce parts for any industry, including automotive, heavy truck, defense, electronics, HVAC, seating and aerospace. JC Gibbons Manufacturing employs 25 at their Livonia, Mich., location.

Challenge

JC Gibbons Manufacturing understands the importance of investing in their team. Committed to advancing the skills of their workers while generating significant impacts to the company, they were interested in finding a variety of training to improve business practices in various areas. They wanted to ensure focus was placed on maintaining quality throughout their processes while identifying additional areas where production could be improved.

Solution

To support these improvement initiatives at JC Gibbons Manufacturing, the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center (The Center) provided training in several areas, including:

Blueprint Reading – Recognizing that there was a disparity in blueprint reading literacy levels among team members, the management team at JC Gibbons Manufacturing decided training would be beneficial to certain employees to get everyone on the same page. This training gave workers the skills needed to better understand blueprints and enabled them to provide more value to their jobs.

Internal Auditor – With two existing internal auditors already at their facility, company leaders decided additional employees should become auditors as well. With this training completed, there are now more diverse, fresh minds analyzing their Quality Management System, providing added insight and input to ensure quality is consistently maintained.

Value Stream Mapping – JC Gibbons Manufacturing worked with experts at The Center to map out their entire production process and locate any bottlenecks or issues. With workers shocked at how many times each produced part was unnecessarily touched, the team realized they were the source of bottlenecks and worked to identify ways to improve production. Following this, JC Gibbons Manufacturing and The Center decided it would be best to replace the many inspection buckets around their facility with larger bins, which served to decrease the total amount of inspections needed and lowered the number of tasks involved overall, ultimately decreasing bottlenecks in production.